Serving Redwall Fans Since March 13, 1999 |
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You're reading a tutorial in the Character Development Studios. Contact: Starfire
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Three Defining Points: The introduction. All three of these aspects are essential to making a character. For gender, you only have two choices, but in species and age you’ve got lots of possibilities. Your age usually helps determine your personality. It affects accent/dialect and level of maturity. Your species dictates lots of things - what your character can and cannot do, the preconceived notions that other characters will have about your character (i.e. hares are gluttons, moles are logical). I suggest using your real gender for characters that will double as aliases for websites, message boards, and first-time roleplaying characters or else, people will start talkin’. ;) (Actually, it just gets confusing if your character is male, but you're female, and vice-versa.) But on message board RPGs and Redwall MUCK, you can (usually) have multiple characters, so you can make some of each if you want. Let me simplify this whole process for you - is this your first Redwall character? If the answer's yes, use your real-life gender. If it's no, then you know all about this. Just pick already. :P There are dozens of species to choose from. However, if it is not a species native to Great Britain, it would not appear in Mossflower Wood unless Mr. Jacques added it through his writing! That means no wallabies, no camels, no unicorns, no elves, no little green men, no spider monkeys, no... get the picture? Okay, because I actually did see someone on MUCK once trying to make a spider monkey character. If it was you, thanks, because I got a good laugh out of that. Note that Brian Jacques has introduced a few species not native to Britain into the books, such as monitor lizards; these are acceptable. 1. Horses, though mentioned in Redwall, aren't really Redwall creatures (they've even been taken off the species list on Redwall MUCK). Whereas Redwallian mice, rats, badgers, etc. have paws and digits (opposable thumbs, too. creative lisence), horses have hooves. Hooves don’t grip things, and the debate over how big horses should be in porportion with the other animals is more trouble than it's worth. There once was a club for Redwall fans with horse characters, though; I don't know if it's still in operation or if there's more than one out there. And if you're joining a club that'll actually let you be a horse... go right ahead if you feel strongly about it. ;) 2. Wolves, while acceptable in some places, are regarded as a non-Redwall species. There was only one mentioned in the books, and he wasn't mentioned alive. The same basically goes for dogs as well - there was only one mentioned in passing (Methuselah spoke of 'an old town dog'). I believe both have received the same treatment as horses on the MUCK - they've been removed from the species list. 3. Yes, it's true. I believe that badgers should be scarce in the ROC, since there were only two or three mentioned alive at the same time in the books. But that's just me. ;) 4. Role-playing a somewhat obscure species, like a vole, a shrew, a sparrow, or a bat, can be more fun than role-playing with a popular species, like a fox or a hare. 5. Remember, though the creatures of Mossflower are relatively the sized, otters and hares are bigger than the other woodlad species, except badgers, which are very large by comparison to mice. On the other hand, dormice are small, mice are in the middle, wildcats are big, ferrets and stoats are bigger than rats... keep sizes in mind when you pick a species. I didn't either! :o) There’s still plenty to choose from. Here’s a pretty complete list (e-mail with species I've missed) of species mentioned in Redwall. Their general alignment is listed with them, along with the occasional note. Woodlander is good, Evil is evil (or vermin), and Neutral is iffy. There is always the occasional exception to these rules, but remember that it is occasional. Woodlanders and Evils can stray to neutral, but it will take some dramatic event to get them completely on the other side of the fence (more on this in another section). The term ‘mentioned once’ means they were mentioned vaguely as a group or once in passing. These are usually species that were introduced in one book, but taken out later, and often aren't good choices for your character's species (i.e., pigs, horses, cows). The term ‘in colony’ means thy were mentioned only a couple of times, but as a colony that took an active role in the story. Adder: Evil Badger: Woodlander Bat: Woodlander (in colony) Beaver: Woodlander (mentioned once) Cat/Wildcat: Neutral Cow: Neutral (mentioned once) Crow: Evil Dog: Assumed neutral (mentioned once) Dormouse: Woodlander Dragon: Mentioned once, in mythical sense, and a HUGE no-no! Eagle: Neutral Ermine: Evil Falcon: Neutral Ferret: Evil Fox: Evil Grayling: Not sentient Great Blue Heron/Grey Heron: Neutral Gull/Seagull: Neutral Hare: Woodlander Hawk: Neutral Hedgehog: Woodlander Horse: Woodlander? (mentioned once) Kite: Neutral Lizard/Monitor Lizard: Evil Magpie: Evil Mole: Woodlander Mouse: Woodlander Newt: Newt-ral (sorry, the temptation was too great ;) Otter/Sea Otter: Woodlander Owl: Neutral Pigeon: Netural? Pigs: Woodlander? (mentioned twice in passing and only in Redwall) Pine Marten: Evil (only 2, Ublaz and Ashleg) Pike: Neutral (they don't discrimate between good and evil) Polecat: Evil (mentioned once) Pygmy Shrew: Neutral (in colony) Rabbit: Neutral Rat: Evil Raven: Evil Robin: Neutral Rook: Evil Seal: Neutral Sea Lion: Neutral Shrew: Woodlander Shrike: Neutral Squirrel: Woodlander Sparrow (sparra): Neutral (in colony) Sparrowhawk: Neutral Stoat: Evil Swan: Neutral Toad: Evil Trout: ??? Vole/Woodvole/Watervole/Bankvole: Woodlander Water Rat: Neutral? (mentioned once) Weasel: Evil Wolf: Evil (mentioned once) No. I’d suggest not being a dragon. :) Fish appear not to be sentient in the books, so I wouldn’t be one of them. The things I listed in the section before last you should watch out for, as well as those species that it’s obvious you shouldn’t be, but other than that, go for it. A few species that aren't role-played nearly enough are various birds, moles, shrews, voles, and other characters that weren't really heroes of the Redwall series, but made up a large part of the population. Their under-use adds to the fun in playing them, so be sure to consider a vole or a sparrow as a character. The passage of time has been debated for a while, though I think a happy medium was reached when it was grandly proclaimed somewhere, long ago, that two years equals one season. Yes, this has been disputed in the Redwall books, most recently in Taggerung, in which the adolescent Tagg was fifteen seasons old. But Martin is also mentioned as being 'two seasons out of infancy' when Luke leaves the northern shores, which doesn't really work with the 'one season is a year' deal. So, if I want my character to be a dibbun of, say, four years old, I divide four by two and BING! my character's two seasons old. If I want my character to be a wise old creature of sixty years, I divide by two and he's thirty seasons. Another note on underused characters... older creatures don't seem to get much use, but they make up the majority of the creatures in the books. I'm not talking about a lack of characters above fifty, but more of a lack of ones that are completely out of adolescence and into adulthood. The majority of characters I've seen are under the twenty year mark (because the majority of Redwall role-players are), but it's just as fun to play a character who's older than that. For reference, here are the general age cateogories...: Dibbuns fall into age categories Infancy-5 seasons, or Infancy-10 years. Pre-teen is 6 seasons/11-12 years. Adolescence is 7-10 seasons/13-20 years. The rest is adult. You don't have to choose an actual age. When you think about it, some creatures aren't going to know their real age if there's nobody who was around when they were born to tell them. It's therefore perfectly acceptable to not have a specific age ("I'm four and a half seasons, and twenty-three days!"), but picking an age range is helpful both to yourself and to other RPers. ~*~ ClosingA lot of RPers like to run off at this point, because they've got a name, an age, a gender, and a species for their character. However, this is a bad idea, because if you rush off into the RPing world right now you'll soon come to a point when another character asks yours, 'Hey, where ya from?' ... and you might not have an answer!    |
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Uncredited text, page designs, and graphics are Copyright © 1999-2004 Starfire, used with permission by Stormclaw for the purposes of this archive. Redwall and all associated titles, themes, books, characters, and places are the property of Mr. Brian Jacques and the Redwall Abbey Company, Limited. This site is non-profit and for entertainment purposes only; any infringement upon the copyrights of others is purely accidental and unintentional. |
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